Atavus

@Atavus

Posts made by Atavus

I think the correct approach is to take a step back and look at the original problem.

You wish to know that a room is in Novice/Respawn so you can use this information in pathfinding.

Why do you need to use this in pathfinding? Because those rooms are walled off.

But the question then is, how does your AI handle trying to go to a normal room that is behind other walled off rooms?

I get the feeling Novice/Respawn is just a more frequent instance of having an area blocked off by walls. You probably should teach your AI to handle that case in pathfinding logic and then you won't need the Novice/Respawn flag.

Each room has a centre position which is calculated once and cached. All structures are offset from that position. For me the cost to calculate this is not so expensive because of how simple(good) and inflexible(bad) the design is.

Normally I check a room only when it has gone up/down in RCL or the cache key(owned structure count) is invalid.

In practice, my architecture (name of the operation in charge of core structures) CPU costs are negligible, but my design is really basic.

As others have mentioned, I feel power creeps are super creeps. That avenue is not worth exploring imho.

The idea of super structures has been proposed and discussed over time. I have a few comments, some high level and some on the specific proposed structures.

First, I'm not a big fan of super structures because they either centralize empires (if 1-2 structures of a type per player) and/or add another advantage to entrenched players.

I'm against centralized empires because it limits the style of play. Currently it is perfectly feasible to run a decentralized empire across multiple shards and locations. Once you add unique per empire structures, there's a need to build around that location to better protect it.

The other issue is that I'm in favor of veteran players having the advantage of better developed code bases (already a huge advantage), providing veterans with more and more options to "invest" their resources besides GCL and Power creates an ever wider rift between old and new.

Second, regarding some of the practical suggestions:

I'm strongly against teleport or similar structures. The "local" nature of the screeps world is an absolutely essential aspect of it. Portals and frog hopping already provide players with plenty of options to get to a specific locations if they wish to. We do not need extra mobility or power projection.

Temple. Why cancel out the current game challenge of bypassing the 15 cap? It's a good, healthy coding challenge for players.